I bought three books:
- The Travel Book, by Lonely Planet, a big, glossy, coffee-table book with pictures and brief synopses of all the things to see/do/eat/say in every country of the world. Yay!
- Once, by Morris Gleitzman, which is the story of a young boy escaping through Nazi Germany. Brilliantly written in the voice of the eleven year old, it is deeply moving, funny and harrowing. Everyone should read this YA book.
- Then, by Morris Gleitzman. Sequel to Once. Just brilliant, again.
And then Kim and I squealed and shrieked through* four boxes of books, wiped the poo off them, repacked them and put them (and another bag of books from the house) in my car for taking home. Kim gave me heaps for my collection of Star Wars novels and made off with all my Diana Wynne Jones books. I marvelled at how many of my collection are children’s books and how many of them I could actually give away or store for later generations. Today, at home, I unpacked them. They are very pretty and do not all fit onto the bookshelves. I was sure I had more of them somewhere, too. Where is my Lord of the Rings, for example? Robin McKinley’s Beauty? Oh, and I bought the dvd of Life is Beautiful, so maybe I will finally get to see it someday.
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* De-cockroached. This means: Kim, having been bribed and bullied, joined me in the garage and was given Slayer status, all the while declaring this to be “Men’s work! We need a man!”. She poked around in the box with a stick, screamed when she discovered a new one, or when a dead one twitched, then gassed them within an inch of their life for me. For some reason, I preferred poo duty to watching can-canning cockroaches wave at us. We tallied seven vicious, man-eating beasties, which we both agree could have grown fifteen feet tall and torn our heads off. Easily.
